{"doi":"10.1101/2020.07.27.223917","title":"CelLEVITAS: Label-free rapid sorting and enrichment of live cells via magnetic levitation","abstract":"Abstract Sorting methods that remove non-viable cells and debris, while retaining a high yield of viable cells, are crucial for many applications in biotechnology, genomics, tissue engineering and medicine. However, a significant challenge is gentle sorting of these different cell states based on very minute differences in density and magnetic signatures, without relying on any labels, tags or markers. Here, a new magnetic levitation-based technology, CelLEVITAS, is developed for the label-free sorting and enrichment of live cells. This work reports the first use of magnetic levitation for sorting of viable and non-viable cells within a microfluidic device and demonstrates extremely effective removal of dead cells and debris from heterogeneous samples. First, the levitation conditions for separating viable and non-viable cells under a magnetic field were fine-tuned. Levitation trajectories of live and dead cell states were then monitored in real-time, as cells magnetically focused to their corresponding levitation bands. CelLEVITAS successfully sorted and enriched live cells from a variety of input cell concentrations (100-200,000 cells/mL) and a variety of input purities (10-50%) into consistently high output purities (>80%). This method is sensitive, does not impair cell viability during sorting, and significantly increases the input sample viability up to 7-fold. Overall, this new magnetic levitation-based sorting strategy drastically reduces the processing time to a single-step, 30-minute sorting protocol and eliminates the manual pre-processing and labeling steps that are required for traditional flow cytometry techniques.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2020,"id":121689,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":6,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9523,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":561719,"name":"Colin A. Grant","orcid":"0000-0001-5865-1736","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":395246,"name":"Mehmet Giray Ogut","orcid":"0000-0002-0280-6038","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":561720,"name":"Bocheng Cai","orcid":"0009-0000-1744-268X","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":395245,"name":"Naside Gözde Durmus","orcid":"0000-0002-7956-5666","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":562432,"name":"Elliot K. Chin","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":24,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:14:46.979435Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}